Populating Carousels by Rule

This approach to populating carousels allows you to create smarter carousels. You assemble a set of rules which the platform runs against your store. The carousel is then populated with the products that these rules select.

One way of viewing this is:

the carousel as access to all the products on your store;

each rule is a way of restricting the products the carousel can see;

the more rules you add, the less products the carousel can select from;

Creating a Rule

Select a field that you want to use to restrict by, for example say you only want products from your Christmas category you would select the Item Category from the menu named Field on the right.

Decide if you want products to match a field. In our example we want products that match (is equal to) from the Operator menu in the middle.

Then select the value you want to match. If you are creating a rule based on a department, category, theme or brand, the relevant values will populate the Value input on the left. For our example we pick Christmas from the menu.

When you are happy with your choices for this rule click the green Add button and your rule will appear in the list at the bottom of the interface.

Sort Order of Displayed Products

You can select various fields to sort your products by. Select the field you wish to sort your carousel by from the Sort-by Field menu.

In PAM there is a field called PAM_Prioirity. By default the carousel will sort using this field first then product name second.

You can also reverse this selection using the Order menu. by default this menu is set to Ascending. Setting this to descending reverses the display order of your products.

At the bottom of the list is a special option called Randomize. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Note that the randomization will only be reset each time you sync your store. This is to do with caching as explained here.

Number of Products Displayed

The Limit menu allows you to select how many products are in your carousel. We limit this number to ensure you store stays responsive. This is the same value as is in the Max Carousel Length option in the Carousel Options tab.

Special Values in Certain Fields

Certain Fields contains magic values (From this department, From this category, From this theme and From this brand). This is discussed in more detail here.

Adding too many Rules to a Carousel

As discussed above rules are a way of excluding products from a carousel. Adding too many rules will narrow the number of products that appear on a carousel quite fast. You might look on your webstore and find no carousel where you included one.

When the rules that populate a carousel don’t return any products, no carousel is rendered.

Products Selected by the Rules

On the right hand side of the interface is a box that will populate with the products that the current rule set will return. When you add or delete rules you need to click the update button to make this list update.

Mousing over a product will display useful data relating to that product.